Boot loader problem ("grub shell" at startup)

[convict]

Background story: I resumed my session after hibernating, and while everything else was fine, my trackpad (including the buttons) didn't work... nothing was frozen, I could still type and get to places with my keyboard, but it was getting kinda annoying, so I decided to restart. I did a hard shutdown (hold the power button down) and then reboot, but instead of getting my normal boot options, it came up with the GRUB commandline. I played around with the commands a little, but didn't figure anything out.

The problem in short: At startup, I get the GRUB console instead of my normal boot options list. I have no clue what to do or how to start up the system.

Basically, that's it... I automatically get the console, but I have no idea how to use it. so I'm stuck. Help much appreciated

[convict]

PANIC UPDATE:
I just tried the "Rescue installed system" (or something like that) option on the Installation DVD, and hit "continue" when presented with the option to mount my current installation, but after going through finding storage devices it come up with the message "You don't have any Linux partitions". At this point, my only option is to go to the terminal.

[stoat]

Hello convict,

If this happened to me, I would try to boot the system by an alternate method, and then re-install GRUB from a terminal in the running system. One idea is the Super Grub Disk. It's a free utility that can boot a GRUB-booted Linux system when the only thing wrong is the boot loader. It can also re-install GRUB and some other useful things. It's not a beautiful GUI app. It's a menu driven thing with a maze of not-so-well-named menu choices. But once you learn it, it's a very handy thing to possess.

Another way to try booting is from that GRUB shell prompt you described. It should look like this grub> and accept keyboard characters. If so, then you may be able to boot the wounded system with these commands at that grub> prompt...

grub> find /grub/stage1
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1

Those two are for identifying the Fedora boot partition if you don't know it. One or both of those will produce a result. Ignore errors messages in the other one. If you have more than one Linux, you have to figure out which is which. Next, using that result for (hdx,y) below...

grub> configfile (hdx,y)/grub/grub.conf

If your system does not have a separate boot partition, or the preceding command failed, do it this way...

grub> configfile (hdx,y)/boot/grub/grub.conf

If the Fedora system boots, try a normal restart. If you have to go through all this again, then re-install GRUB using the Super Grub Disk or terminal commands in the running Fedora. If you need help re-installing with terminal commands, return here for it.

[convict]

Thanks, but that didn't solve it... perhaps my partitions are stuffed?

find didn't come up with anything (Error 15: File not found, tried it multiple time and I'm absolutely certain it's not a typo or anything). I tried configfile for all partitions (only have 1 hard drive) with both /grub/grub.conf and /boot/grub/grub.conf, but it came up with wither "bad file or directory type", "file not found" or "cannot mount selected partition"... I assume that I hit my /home when I got FNF and my Vista partition & swap for the mount error. Would this mean that some of the stuff or the entire partition was corrupted?

[convict]

I just tried booting up with Ubuntu LiveCD that I had lying around. None of my files are lost, my Windows installation and /home partition seem intact and fine. It does, however, refuse to mount my root partition. I forgot the exact error message, but it said something about possible bad fs type, bad superblock, missing helper program among other things that could be wrong... will post details if necessary.

How would I go about fixing it?

[convict]

Well, I just tried fsck'ing it, I get the error message "fsck.ext3: A block group is missing an inode table while checking ext3 journal for /dev/sda2". I googled around a little but can't find a solution for this kinda problem... is my installation totaled?